Long Pasta

Greek supermarkets sell long pasta by number rather than by name, and the thick hollow tubes sold as number two are bought for one purpose: pastitsio. They are longer and considerably thicker than spaghetti, with a narrow hole running through the middle that fills with meat sauce during baking. Bucatini is the nearest thing on a shelf outside Greece and works in exactly the same way.

The pasta is laid in the tray in one direction, all the strands running the same way, so that a cut portion holds together and shows a clean cross section rather than falling apart on the serving slice. It is tossed first with the egg whites left over from the bechamel yolks, which sets as it bakes and binds the base layer into something you can actually lift.

Elsewhere the same long pasta does simpler work. Makaronia me kima is spaghetti under a cinnamon-scented meat sauce, and the plainest dish in the whole repertoire is boiled pasta tossed with browned butter and a heavy shower of salty grated mizithra. In every baked version the pasta is deliberately undercooked, because it goes on cooking in the sauce for another forty minutes.